Monday, September 25, 2017

Secretary of Defense James Mattis steered clear of passing any type of judgement on NFL players kneeling during the national anthem during a press gaggle on a flight to India Monday.

“I’m the secretary of defense. We defend the country,” is all Mattis would give on the subject. Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Rob Manning went a bit further in a briefing with reporters Monday with respect to service academy players, expressing his “hope” that they would stand.

Whenever I hear about NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem, I am reminded of the double amputees that have returned from America’s wars. And the fact that while, because of our Armed Services' sacrifice over centuries, we are entitled to speak freely, but none of us are entitled to do so in a particular forum.

NFL players are employees of a larger organization, just like Curt Schilling was when ESPN fired him for what he thought was protected speech. The speech is protected. Your access to a particular forum is not. They are teammates in a sport that pays these allegedly oppressed spoiled brats millions. Their teammates may share a different view, so does the locker room become a game prep area or a debating society? Does the field remain a porting arena or a campaign rally? Those who take a knee were indeed given that right by many who no longer have knees and are privileged to take a knee in a sport paid for by millions of fans who may disagree with them and who paid to see a game, not a protest. Players who take a knee think they are being patriotic, when they are merely being elf-indulgent and selfish. Go rent out a stadium and invite people to pay just to see you take a knee and see if anybody shows up. Theresponse by the MFL Players Association is disingenuous, at best:

Hollywood's nutjobs also support the country that has murdered millions through starvation, lacks running water and electricity through much of the country, and imprisons tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent children:

QOTD: "The socialist dictatorship of [Venezuela's] Nicolas Maduro has inflicted terrible pain and suffering on the good people of that country. This corrupt regime destroyed a prosperous nation by imposing a failed ideology that has produced poverty and misery everywhere it has been tried. To make matters worse, Maduro has defied his own people, stealing power from their elected representatives to preserve his disastrous rule.

The Venezuelan people are starving and their country is collapsing. Their democratic institutions are being destroyed. This situation is completely unacceptable and we cannot stand by and watch.

...The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems." --President Donald J. Trump

Friday, September 22, 2017

Multiple women in relationships with Imran Awan, the indicted former IT aide for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have recently called Virginia law enforcement and alleged being abused by him, police reports obtained under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act show.

Officers found one of the women bloodied and she told them she “just wanted to leave,” while the second said she felt like a “slave,” according to Fairfax County Police reports obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group. A third woman claimed she was being kept “in captivity.”

The third woman is Awan’s stepmother, Samina Gilani, who said in court documents that Awan invoked his authority as a congressional employee to intimidate immigrant women, in part by telling them he had the power to have people kidnapped.

All but two of the nearly two dozen Democratic women Awan worked for in the House declined to comment on the police reports.

The credibility of mainstream political polls took a serious hit following the 2016 election. Most predicted an easy victory for Hillary Clinton. The entire political class believed she was a shoo-in, and that the election would be a mere formality. But the polls and the pundits were wrong, glaringly so.

It appears they are wrong again, because they persist in making the same mistakes they have been making for years.

Most pollsters and pundits report that President Trump’s approval ratings are in the tank — consistently in the mid- to upper-30 percent range. His disapproval rates average a whopping 57 percent, according to the polls cited below.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

I'm thinking about launching a service like Politifact or Snopes, only honest.

In March, bestselling author and talk radio superstar Mark Levin laid out an ironclad case that the Obama administration had wiretapped the Trump campaign. In fact, Levin's evidence hinged upon reports in The New York Times and the Washington Post which, as you know, are both hotbeds of right-wing extremism.

Yet -- defying facts, logic, reason, history and common sense -- the media ignored its own reports to pillory Levin.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Trump made a great speech at the UN today. The kind that got him elected in the first place. You should really watch it from beginning to end right here.

Now let's see if Trump follows thru, like he hasn't since he became president. Of course, if he doesn't, again, his idol worshipers can blame the people Trump hired and who work for him at his pleasure. (He is the most powerful man in the world, isn’t he?) So then he can fire them and hire new people who can then be blamed again for his failure to keep the promises he makes in his great speeches. And if that doesn’t work, his die-hard minions can always scapegoat the “deep state,” or whatever.

Monday, September 18, 2017

We observe cultural shifts. This is one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing, and I’ve noticed some things. I didn’t watch the Emmy Awards last night, but hardly did anybody else, either. We may have a record low viewership for the Emmys last night. I don’t care what you say, if you did watch it, if you’ve heard about it, sure, it was a three-hour -- or however long it went on -- bash-, humiliate-, embarrass-Trump fest.

But that’s not the way to look at it. The way to look at it is Hollywood, in its most prestigious awards show for the television industry, devoted all three hours to Donald Trump.